Chinatown
by FalseEyelashes
Summary: He'll try to save the girl, because it's what a man is supposed to do. He'll try to save her, but in the end, the gun will still fire, the car horn will still blare and it will all still be the same. He'll still be standing here. Right here. In Chinatown.


**Chinatown****  
**_  
_**Disclaimer: **JJ created them; I just play with them  
**Rating: **R  
**Word Count: **2485  
**Summary: **He'll try to save the girl, because it's what a man is supposed to do. He'll try to save her, but in the end, the gun will still fire, the car horn will still blare and it will all still be the same. He'll still be standing here. Right here. In Chinatown. (Jack/Juliet, with some Jack/Kate and Kate/Sawyer)

* * *

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

- _Chinatown_

_

* * *

_

First, there's a crash – a car, a plane, your world. Next, comes a woman.

And then? You repeat. You repeat.

You repeat.

(This will start the way it ends.)

* * *

He opens his eyes to green. He opens his eyes to the ceiling, chains hanging from up above, the solid length of a table beneath him. He opens his eyes on green and he can see himself reflected back in the glass wall before him.

He closes his eyes again.

* * *

The radio is heavy in his hand. There's little more than static on the other end and he waits in dread for gunshots and screams and Kate's tiny, scared voice. Nothing comes. He waits. Nothing comes.

Breathing hard he asks what now.

Juliet slides her mask down, mouth in a straight line. Face blank, eyeing the man standing there (the man, because villains don't come with nametags that mean anything) and speaks.

"Now we let him die."

* * *

There was a woman named Sarah and when Jack first met her she couldn't feel her toes. Her name was Sarah, and it still is Sarah, somewhere, far away, and she was quiet and slight and simple in all the ways a woman never is.

He thought he was supposed to save her. He thought for awhile there he had.

He guesses the important thing here is that sometimes you can break what you fix and they really won't trust you enough to fit the pieces back together for them again.

* * *

Sarah kissed him because she could walk again. One hand clutching the walker before her, the other his wrist, she pulled him slightly. And kissed him.

He slept with her that first night after their first real date, her bedroom lit with the streetlamps shining bright outside.

He didn't sleep, just laid still beside her. We're still so young, he had thought. We're still so young.

* * *

Jack dreams of lions in cages that roar against the rising sun; he dreams of dying men that stumble the earth, blood falling from tired eyes that can't look upward. He sees cars that crash and a blonde head slamming into the steering wheel, horn blaring, car flipping and "I can feel it," she whispers through a mosaic of broken glass and jagged metal. "I can feel it," and the glass is there, a windshield, a wall, and she lays, she lies, she remains on the other side. "You can trust me, Jack," she says, and slowly, her eyes slip closed, just in time to miss the explosion in the sky.

He awakens to silence and swears he can still smell burning jet fuel.

* * *

They stand in silence in the operating room, a man dead on the floor, a man dying on the table. He doesn't move and that has to make him an accomplice in this and Juliet holds a gun he doesn't remember her firing.

"You love her, don't you." Her lips barely move as she says it, eyes fixed on nothing and it's not even a question, and he wonders if they have a fucking file on this. The Unrequited Loves (if you can use that word) of Jack Shephard's Life. He wonders why she says it like that, like she wants a section all her own, pages dedicated in her name, and he thinks he must have it all wrong. He blames Ben, open and bloody on the table, and the scalpels and the close quarters because she doesn't care, she can't possibly care.

"I don't even know her," he says.

He doesn't really think it's out of line to say she looks relieved.

It makes him wish that he said yes just to watch her frown. (It's payback in the small, trite doses and he's not really sure if she deserves the brunt of his rage. He doesn't think he cares, he can't possibly care.)

* * *

Kate kissed him, the stubble on his face burning her palms, and she kissed him. She kissed him and she tasted strong, tangy, bright, ripe fruit plucked off the branch and he thought, his hand sliding up the length of her spine, that was how this story ended.  
**  
**

* * *

On his knees, unyielding planks of wood beneath him, the wind whistles low, swan song, death march and the gag between his teeth tastes of salt and sea alike.

They approach with the bags in hand and he thought he'd die old and alone (like his father). He thought one day his heart would do him the favor and just stop, and the world would quit moving and they all would quit leaving, and like bad poetry, he'd find freedom in death and answers in ashes.

He looks to her, Kate, on her knees, hunched forward next to him. He looks to her, and if he could, it wasn't supposed to go like this, he would say. This isn't our home; we don't die here. Instead, he looks at her like he loves her (like he'll save her) and trembling jaw and dancing eyelids she looks like the start of an apology.

The bag slips over his head before he can ask her why.

* * *

There was a woman named Kate he met with sand in his teeth and blond smeared across his palms. He thought it once, that first day, then, after, never allowed it to cross his mind again. With the waves crashing a murderous tempo and the birds still and silent, with an invisible ocean breeze rising through her dark hair and all the green and the mud and the dark he thought she belonged to the island. He thought, maybe, sharp pain and dulled shock, that the crashing plane was just returning her home.

He thought he was supposed to save her.

The TV screens before him, and the grainy, monochromatic picture, Kate sprawled out across Sawyer's lap, back bare, his hand there, Jack had felt little more than the tragic voyeur, the narrator of this tale. And he wondered, guns in the cabinet, locked and loaded, if two sad and broken things can add up to something whole. He had hoped not.

Gun in his hand, and he's always been selfless, always altruistic (always the hero), but that doesn't make him kind.

He let her run. He won't be there when she trips and falls.

* * *

Jack kind of gets it that there always has to be a woman. There always has to be a woman and not necessarily romance, but there has to be a woman there to love and it was his mother, his wife and he had wanted it to be her (Kate) too. He gets he wasn't enough to hold her steady in one place. He gets he loved her (loves her, wanted to love) because she was there and there has to be something wrong with that.

There were too many things he didn't know about Kate.

He knows even less about Juliet. He does know you can't love what you hate (you can't) and she should feel grateful.

I'm never going to break your heart, he wants to say. But I'm never going to love you either.

(If Kate taught him anything it's that lying is easier when you believe it yourself.)

**

* * *

Juliet kissed him and he never asked her why. Ben was dead, and still clad in ill-fitting scrubs, smelling of antiseptic and hospitals and death, she kissed him.**

I'm too old for this, he thought, but kissed her back all the same.

* * *

Juliet smells like the South. She'll enter the room, quick, efficient, almost shy, long blonde hair streaming down her back, and he'll think of long front porches and green yards that stretch on forever. She'll enter the room and she'll smell like heat, she'll smell like summer.

She tells him she made him grilled cheese and it's magnolias that she smells like.

His sandwich tastes like nothing. He thinks of counting blades of grass.

* * *

They talk in low tones, in her house, and he's seen too much too soon to let surprise flicker through him.

"And Ben?" he asks, staring at homey yellow walls and a coffee table hidden beneath mountains of books and paperwork.

"What about Ben?" (and he expected there to be mourning in that voice of hers, and instead, instead he gets a kind of muffled irritation that she really has no right in possessing because she killed him, she fucking let him die.)

"You were in love with him?"

She looks down and back up again, almost a nod, maybe an affirmation.

"He was everything I knew," she says, and Jack gets it. It's the past tense, less romantic, the no longer in love way of saying yes, Jack. He was my world.

He kisses her.

He's angry and she's tired and he gets this, muted passion, in return.

* * *

Sarah was the woman you took to the PG-13 romantic comedy and shared a large popcorn neither of you ate and took out for coffee where you spent more time talking than drinking. Kate was the woman you wanted to fuck because she was there, because you thought she was supposed to be the Eve to your Adam in this strange, new world. She was the woman you wanted to start over with and love to prove that you could still feel, that you were still alive.

(Juliet was the woman you spent your life wondering if she really existed, the perfect equal, and she's not romantic and this isn't romance but that wasn't what you were looking for anyway.)

* * *

She tastes plain, he thinks, as his lips and tongue and teeth travel the length of her neck. Her neck pale, and she lives on an island, she lives in the sun and there's a strange thrill of delight because she's pale and soft and pure and he's broken and weather-beaten, tanned (and wrong).

She lets him touch her, lets him, because Jack still likes to think he has some semblance of control here, some semblance of power in this situation, but it's her hand wrapping around his neck, it's her hand slipping down his chest, down farther, fist around his cock, and it's him moaning out in return.

He thinks how average this must be, tongues tangling, teeth clinking, him on her on a couch in a room that could be anyone else's. (This should be mundane he thinks, but, a heady pant from her in his ear, Juliet, wet beneath his fingers, her lips brushing against his cheek, this kind of feels like everything.)

She's laid out beneath him, and they're still in those fucking scrubs, and this is ridiculous, they killed a man, she killed two, and they're in her house, on an island and they should be running (they should be Kate and Sawyer and they should be running – they should be in love).

He wants to tell her, working her pants, her panties, down and off her hips, pale skin, white skin, that he once taught a woman to walk, that he once saved a woman's world, that maybe, if you let him, he can do the same again. Impatient kisses and fingernails that dig into his shoulders as he thrusts hard and into her he thinks she wouldn't want to hear it, she wouldn't want to hear it from him.

Breathing hard, tight in the chest, hands holding her thighs, a tempo he can't keep, he wants to ask her what this is, but head rolled back, neck bared for him, blonde hair spilling everywhere (a dead man on a table) he really doesn't think she'd have an answer.

* * *

He opens his eyes to green. He opens his eyes to the ceiling, chains hanging from up above, the solid length of a table beneath him. He opens his eyes on green and he can see himself reflected back in the glass wall before him.

He closes his eyes again.

* * *

There's a knock and he knows how this goes. There's a knock and there's food and there's her.

There's a knock and the door opens, grinding metal, sliding force.

A man stands in the doorway.

"Where's Juliet?" he asks, throat tight, and he thinks he's asking the wrong question.

"Who's Juliet?" The man (not Ben, not Pickett, not the dead man in the OR) asks in return, the ghost of a smile gracing his face. "You must be mistaken. There is no Juliet here."

The man leaves a plate of food on the table, and, with a slight nod and a smile that chills instead of calms, he exits, door slamming shut behind him.

(Jack didn't ask how he ended up back here again.)

He eats the sandwich. It tastes like nothing. The chains rattle above his head and the room is cold.

He sits against the wall, just like she told him to do, and if he were his father he would tell you this is why the Red Sox will never win the pennant. It's why Jack will never get the girl. Some men are just made to suffer. Some cities are just built to burn.

You knew it couldn't end well anyway.

* * *

There was a woman named Juliet with a smile explaining everything and nothing, with the grace of civilizations of cold concrete and rising steel.

He thought she was supposed to save him.

They tell him there is no Juliet, that she isn't real, and he's left all alone. He's left alone with glass and metal and four walls that end in straight lines and sharp corners.

He knows it's a lie.

They tell him there is no Juliet and he calls them liars, for when the room is silent and the air is still, when everything is green and bright, he can still smell magnolias.

* * *

There was a man named Jack and when this is over, and it already is, his obituary will read like an epic. He was a hero, they will write and say, and candles will burn and flowers will grow.

He won't be there to remind them of his failures.

They wouldn't want to hear it anyway.

* * *

First. There's a crash. A car. A plane. Your world. Next. There's a woman.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat until you realize this ending will never change.

(Repeat.)

* * *

**  
**

**_fin._**


End file.
